‘Occupy Wall Street highlights botched US economic system’

There’s a real anger that results from that and that’s what Occupy Wall Street has come to express. It’s “we are the 99-percent”. It’s a vague outpouring of outrage at a system that failing to work.”

Police in New York have arrested at least 51 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters ahead of the one-year anniversary of the anti-capitalist movement.
The demonstrators were reportedly arrested over charges ranging from disorderly conduct to assault. The first arrests were made on Saturday when about 300 OWS protesters marched to Zuccotti Park in New York’s Lower Manhattan.
According to organizers, the OWS protesters will surround the New York Stock Exchange and disrupt morning rush hour in the financial district on Monday to mark the first anniversary of the movement.
The OWS movement emerged after a group of demonstrators gathered in New York's financial district on September 17, 2011 to protest, among other things, the excessive influence of big corporations on the US policies as well as the unjust distribution of wealth and the high-level corruption in the country.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Caleb Maupin, activist and Occupy Movement protester, to further discuss the issue. The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: One year ago it all started. Please tell us in retrospect how you see the Occupy Wall Street - or now being called the Re-Occupy Wall Street movement.
Maupin: I see Occupy Wall Street really as the expression of what millions and millions of people, especially the youth but not only the youth, in the United States feel, which is a sense of outrage and anger at the super-rich, the small “one-percent” that they’ve dubbed them.
This group that has all this wealth and all this power while all across the US the so-called American dream - the thing that people have been raised to believe - is the key aspect of US society: this white-picket fence; this house; this car; this chance of financial prosperity all across the US, that is being destroyed.
The US is becoming a low-wage economy. The US workers are ending up in an extremely impoverished situation. There’s mass unemployment; there’s homes being foreclosed left and right, and people are looking at this “one-percent” that profits amid all of this.
This thing is that millions and millions and millions of dollars that continue to be spent on wars and gas while all throughout the US people are really suffering.
There’s a real anger that results from that and that’s what Occupy Wall Street has come to express. It’s “we are the 99-percent”. It’s a vague outpouring of outrage at a system that failing to work.
Press TV: In your views, what’s next for OWS?
Maupin: I was just moments ago in Zuccotti park, the site of the occupation. There’s at least 800 youth there. Many people there from all across the country have come.
Tomorrow morning, there’re mass plans of civil disobedience. There’s going to be intersections that are going to be shut down, possibly hundreds of arrests.
The anger that people have at the way society is right now with billions and billions of dollars being spent on war and nothing for people at home, with extreme poverty, with home foreclosures, with mass unemployment, with racist police terror, people being murdered in the streets, with a prison system that based on profits -- where money gets made from locking people in prison -- that anger isn’t going to go away.
If one looks at the world whether it’s Greece, Spain, the Middle East, everywhere, there’s a state of revolt going on. That state of revolt isn’t going to stop just because Zuccotti Park is no longer being held by the Occupy Movement. That state of anger, that state of revolt is spurned on by the problems of the capitalist system at this very moment.
Until those problems are resolved, things aren’t going to change. Millions are in the streets, millions are filled with rage and they’re only going to grow.
They may take different forms. The Chicago teacher’s strike was very much, I think, linked with Occupy Wall Street. If it hadn’t been for Occupy Wall Street going on, defying the “one-percent” - in a way, when one group confronts the status quo and confronts the “one-percent,” that gives more people permission to do it themselves.
It opens up. Here in New York, there’s a sit down in a place called the “Hot and Crusty.” It was a place that makes pita, and the workers were being very badly treated; and Occupy Wall Street joined with the labor union and they occupied “Hot and Crusty.” That was a huge victory.
All across the country, the Occupy Movement has opened up political space for people to finally break free of this stifling political atmosphere.
GMA/SS